Population Health Publications

This obesity cost report, prepared for the Alberta Cancer Board, delves into considerable detail on the methodologies and data sources appropriate to risk factor costing studies. It also uses the most recent available epidemiological data to provide new information on the cost of obesity-related illnesses not included in GPI Atlantic's original 2000-01 obesity cost studies, including, for example, 14 different cancer types now reliably linked to obesity. Illness costs by diagnostic category are summed to provide an aggregate estimate for obesity costs in Alberta.

A summary of this report can be found on the Alberta Health Services website.

This report provides the technical background information that would be required to produce a report assessing the health costs associated with poverty for Canada. As such, it reviews methodologies used in previous studies to assess: the broad social and economic costs of poverty in Canada (Calgary), the United States, and Europe; methodologies used in socioeconomic health disparity studies with an emphasis on studies from New Zealand and The Netherlands, as well as general cost of illness studies; basic information on Canadian and international poverty measures; and evidence for the association of poverty with various health indicators. In addition, it briefly reviews several groups that are especially vulnerable to the health impacts of poverty, and other social issues that influence the relationship between poverty and health.

The emphasis of this report is on the information and data that would be required to assess the external health costs of poverty, rather than the private costs incurred by those living in poverty. These external health costs, which all have major policy implications in terms of government decisions to invest in poverty reduction programs, include costs to the health care system that result from the association between poorer health outcomes and low income. There are, however, other costs, which result from the effects of poverty on society in general. These include costs related to the criminal justice system, social assistance programs, educational systems, and to employment and productivity. In addition, other social issues that result in social exclusion, such as homelessness, food insecurity, and environmental problems also register as costs. Due to time and resource limitations, these social costs are explored only briefly in this report.

The review is intended as a useful starting point for further work in this area—in particular the eventual development of a full-fledged study assessing the health and other social costs of poverty for Canada and the provinces that will hopefully make a significant contribution to advancing work in the field of social and economic determinants of health. In the short term, it is hoped that even this modest first step of summarizing key results from the existing evidence can raise the profile of this important issue and facilitate the practical application of this information to decisions made in the policy arena and in this field of research.

The purpose of this report is to provide the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), and specifically, the Population Health Promotion Expert Group (PHPEG) and the Healthy Living Issue Group (HLIG) of the Pan-Canadian Public Health Network (PHN) with information, analysis and suggestions for a common set of health disparities indicators, and a feasible approach to their implementation in the Canadian context. The objective is to identify indicators that could lead to an agreed upon set of measures that could be used by Federal- Provincial/Territorial (F-P/T) jurisdictions to assess progress in the reduction of health disparities. Specifically, the mandate of the report is to include:

• A comprehensive review of existing Canadian and international data sources to identify indicators of health disparities for which data are available,
• A gap analysis to determine indicators which are desirable and for which data are not being collected, and
• Recommendations for a common set of indicators of health disparities and a feasible approach for their implementation in the Canadian context.

Authors: Ronald Colman, PhD and Janet Rhymes, MA

The full economic and social costs of tobacco use in Nova Scotia were reported by GPI Atlantic in The Cost of Tobacco in Nova Scotia (2000). This current report uses the latest and most widely accepted research and analytical techniques to update and enhance our knowledge of the
real costs of tobacco use to Nova Scotians. This update is necessary in light of recent research findings, and because new results have become available to provide evidence of the impacts of comprehensive tobacco control strategies in other jurisdictions. Most importantly, tobacco use in
the province has declined significantly since 2000, largely as a result of comprehensive tobacco reduction strategies implemented by the Province of Nova Scotia, so the trends outlined in the 2000 report (based on the most recent 1999 data available at that time) also required updating.